My wife, Aileen Hogan, who has died of cancer aged 59, was a researcher and administrator in molecular and developmental biology.
Daughter of James Hogan, a salesman, and his wife, Mona, a nurse, Aileen was born in the Canadian capital, Ottawa. She grew up in Richmond Hill, Ontario, and went to St Joseph’s Morrow Park school in Toronto. After graduating from the University of Toronto, she worked at McMaster University with Phil Branton, the professor of pathology, in the early days of research into tyrosine kinases (enzymes involved in the development of cancer). She began her PhD in 1981 at the University of Western Ontario in the cancer research laboratory, which was where I met her. She was at the centre of a group of friends who worked hard and played hard.
Aileen was a good-looking, independent woman, full of confidence. She had a typically Canadian spirit of self-reliance: she drove a huge old 6-litre Chevy Bel Air and had no qualms about changing a wheel by herself, alone, in the dark. She was a strong person, physically and mentally.
We married in 1985 and moved to Britain, where we settled in Oxford. Aileen wanted to change fields to developmental biology and had won a postdoctoral job working on the genetics of the Drosophila fruit fly. After a year she switched again and became Rosa Beddington’s first postdoctoral researcher, working on mouse embryology.
In Oxford, Aileen fell in love with England – its houses, gardens, its churches and history. But in 1989 we moved back to Canada, to Calgary, where Aileen took a job at the university. To her great joy, our children Lucy and Michael came along in the early 1990s and gave a new focus to her life.
A six-month sabbatical back in Britain in 1996 was the catalyst to reawaken Aileen’s love for the country and so we came back, settling in Norwich. Aileen loved everything about being in the UK: the faster pace of life, the telly, the Guardian quiz, the sense of humour. She moved from bench research into science administration, commuting every weekday to Cambridge.
By 2012 Aileen had started to be ill with what proved to be metastatic cholangiocarcinoma. Most friends did not know she was so ill, because she wanted simply to get on with life, behaving with customary grittiness.
She is survived by me and our children, by her sister-in-law Sybil and nieces, Laura and Andrea.
